Official: Most of City of Atlanta's online network back up and running after cyberattack

We are less than seventy days into the ongoing Atlanta cyberattack and city officials say the crisis finally appears ...

Posted: May 23, 2018 6:16 AM

Updated: May 23, 2018 6:16 AM

We are less than seventy days into the ongoing Atlanta cyberattack and city officials say the crisis finally appears to be just about over.

Most of the city's online network is back up and running, except for the municipal courts and that could be fixed as soon as next week.

"The focus with me and the team was how do we protect the city, how do we get us back up," said Richard Cox.

Chief Operating Officer Richard Cox was on the job all of four days when the news broke that the City of Atlanta was under cyber attack.

"Initially it was around the clock, we literally had teams that were staying here 20-24 hours in some cases. I'll tell you what, personally I got very acquainted with city hall early on and it was because we had to stay around the clock," said Cox.

After being held hostage for two months by ransomware hackers, nearly all of Atlanta's customer service portals have now been restored.

"The expectations were set early on that this is a long-term process and we're finding that to be true; however, I'm really pleased to say save the courts all customer facing applications are now up and we're expecting the courts to be up in the next week or so," said Cox.

The city has reserved nearly $5 million in emergency funding to fix the vulnerabilities that led to the hack.

"The City of Atlanta is in the best defensive posture we've ever been in and I say defensive because what I've learned is you can't totally secure a network but you can do a really good job of defending it we've learned that municipalities and organizations get attacked on a regular basis so we never claim victory but we feel really good about our progress," said Cox.

And so far, there's no evidence that anyone's personal information has been compromised.

"At this point there's no indication that we've lost data however the investigation continues I would say that we are cautiously optimistic however as the mayor said early on we treat this with an abundance of caution so making sure our employees our citizens do everything that we can to be diligent at protecting our personal information," said Cox.